Data and voice communications networks increasingly rely on general purpose packet switching networks, such as TCP/IP addressed data communications, to transfer packet information among numerous different sorts of nodes with varying capabilities. The nodes include applications on end user terminals that exchange messages, various hubs, routers and switches that direct the packets over various communications links operable at different data rates, shared servers that store and/or supply services to the users such as audio, video conferencing or program distribution, and ancillary services associated with communications activities, such as diagnostics, activation (provisioning), billing, metric collection for traffic engineering and planning, and other functions.
Such resources have limited capacity and are not free. The resources are sold or rented to users, such as subscribers or members of an enterprise, typically with charges being assessed according to the capabilities of the services that the user reserves, such as the bandwidth of respective communication paths. Various primary and auxiliary hardware and software elements are coupled to the network (or to the enterprise subnet or the like) to provide services. These elements are owned or controlled for the benefit of particular parties, e.g., the owners, their subscribers and authorized users.
The resources are generally coupled over a common communications network. Addressing, encryption and authorization techniques are available to limit the use of certain resources to authorized users or to monitor the extent of usage by particular users or groups. For example, subscribers may contract for access up to a bandwidth limit and the supplier can monitor usage to disconnect the user (disable further usage) or to change to a different billing rate if the limit is met.
To an extent, communications services, media programming, data processing applications and other services, are commodities. In fact, communications transport and data applications and services can be treated as commodities at various different levels. At each level, the commodities can become the basis of a market. In that market, competition on the supply side and on the demand side can improve availability of existing services and encourage production of additional ones, allocate available services efficiently, make better use of capacity, and reduce expense.
Combinations of services packaged together across multiple service suppliers in a shared revenue model to meet specific target market needs and for specific time based events can increase the value of commoditized services to a target subscriber base, yielding an increase in revenue opportunities and market adoption rates.
It would be advantageous, and it is an aspect of the present invention, to facilitate markets in such commodities. The invention provides what is needed in information and standardized processing techniques, to know and enable comparison of what communications and data applications commodities are, what they can do and how to use them. The information and standardized techniques can include various forms of valuation information and quantization techniques for treating the bandwidth or other capacity in a way that it can be subdivided into units of time and/or data and can be contracted (subscribed) and charged for in such units.
As an additional beneficial aspect, above and beyond considerations of allocation of resources among users and improving the availability and value of services by establishing a market, it is appropriate to supervise the provisioning of resources to users so that a user or a user's application is not permitted to invoke a resource that the application is not capable of using (or perhaps is not capable of using the resource as fully as another competing application or user). On the other hand, loading conditions and available resource allocations can be varied. If a given less expensive resource happens to be unavailable, it is an added value to switch the user to an alternative source that is available, even if that may be a trade-up for the user. Such options and alternatives, and others, advantageously are taken into account in efforts to efficiently provide, configure, allocate and use the resources.
It would be advantageous to improve network capabilities while employing an allocation system that is highly versatile, highly variable, and involves a minimum overhead.